Most of us can’t stop crying or looking at the photographs of the parents waiting to find out if their children are okay, or swooping in to pick up their sobbing scared children. The lucky ones. The survivors.

Is there anything worse than children being murdered in cold blood in a school shooting?

Is there anything a parent fears more than that something will happen to her child?

At the end of one breaking New York Times article about the school shooting a mom says to a reporter, “I’m not going to talk to my child about this.”

We want to ignore it. We want to pretend it didn’t happen. We don’t want to talk to our children about it. We reason they are too young. We don’t want to scare them. We don’t want them to know.

But this is a mistake. In this Digital Age of cell phones and Twitter and Facebook most children—even those as young as three or four years old—will be aware that something devastating, tragic, horrible, unspeakable happened this morning at a small town elementary school in Connecticut. Pretending it didn’t won’t help keep them safe.

Children know when something’s wrong. Even if they don’t hear it on the radio or watch it on TV, they know when their parents are upset. They know when the nation is grieving.

No parent in America wants this to have happened. No parent in America wants to have to tell a child something as horrible as this.

But we need to be honest with our children.

When my friend L’s mom died her family never told her. They reasoned she was too young. They didn’t want to upset her. She was told that her mom went on a trip. She was told her mom was coming back. A grown-up with a grown child of her own now, she’s still haunted by her mother’s disappearance. Her mother was taken away from her and the adults around her robbed her of the right to talk through what happened and to grieve.

How do we talk to our children?

There’s no right way.

Here are six tips that will help you talk to your kids about a school shooting:

1) Take your cues from them: Let them ask you questions and answer them honestly without giving them more information than they can handle. “What happened Mommy?” “A very sick unhappy bad man brought a gun into a school and killed some children there.”

2) Listen and accept what they are thinking and feeling: Listen to everything they tell you, even the bad stuff, without moralizing or judging them. If your son says, “I want to kill anyone who would do something like that” now is not the time to tell him his anger and frustration and feelings of rage are wrong. Instead you could say, “It makes you really angry, doesn’t it?” and invite him to talk some more.

3) Be honest about how YOU feel without overwhelming them with your emotions: “I feel very sad about the shooting today. I am very angry at that man. I am very sorry that he did not get help. I feel so sad for the parents whose children were killed.”

4) Save your worst fears for conversations with grownups: Don’t tell your children you fear for their safety or you never want them to go to school again. Save the overwhelming emotions and your darkest fears for conversations with your partner, other parents, or a therapist.

5) Let them talk about it as much (or as little) as they want: Invite them to ask you questions and try to give them direct honest answers. If your kids don’t want to talk about it, don’t push it. But remind them (now and always) that you are always available if they want to talk about it, or anything else, even if it’s the middle of the night, and you won’t be angry if they wake you up or interrupt you if the subject is something important or if they are feeling scared.

6) Try to keep your children away from the TV and the Internet: The sensationalism and graphic nature of news programs for adults are not appropriate for children. If possible, try to keep even your older teens away from television shows. Tell them honestly you don’t want them to watch the shows and why. “I know this is interesting to you and your friends are watching it but I’m afraid it’s too upsetting and it will give you bad dreams and make you feel afraid. I’d rather we talk together and read the newspaper but I don’t think it will help us to watch this stuff on TV.”

Most adults don’t realize that children grieve differently than grown-ups. Children tend to process information in fits and starts. They can be playing and oblivious one moment and devastated and sad the next.

Don’t worry if your child doesn’t seem upset.

And don’t be concerned if your child incorporates this tragedy into their fantasy play.

Pretend play is one very effective tool children use to make sense of and process the world around them.

Time to close the computer and talk to your kids. I hope you never have to have another conversation like this again.

Comments

I believe this is right on, Jennifer. I appreciate the promptness with which you put this out and I will be sharing it with Moms and Dads I know. I agree that we must talk about these things with our children and more importantly listen to them.

I will share this advice with my son and his wife for their children. This country needs gun control. Here is an astute summary from CBS journalist Peter Greenberg: “As a journalist and a writer, I pride myself in being able to jump on a story, get the facts,and, in a professional and unemotional way provide needed perspective. But not today. Today I find myself unable to do much of anything. Except to be overwhelmed by two overriding emotions: sorrow, and anger. Deep sorrow and sadness for the families whose children were taken from them earlier this morning in the most senseless and violent way, and anger for anyone — and I mean anyone — who would even try to mount an argument against gun control. Don’t you even TRY to justify your position. and to America’s leaders on both sides of the aisle who have intentionally deferred, deflected, belittled or outright ignored the elephant in the room — this is the time to stop playing to your base and realize that this is a nonpartisan, nonnegotiable issue that needs to be handled….NOW. This is much more important than a fiscal cliff — It’s life and death. And we need to rise up as one and deliver a unanimous verdict — with the appropriate consequences — that affirms intelligence, common sense, and humanity.”

Thanks for posting this. I’ll be with a group of folks tonight leading a prayer and song vigil in Newtown. This is great information to share.

I have one comment on this line, ‘The sensationalism and graphic nature of news programs for adults are not appropriate for children. If possible, try to keep even your older teens away from television shows. Tell them honestly you don’t want them to watch the shows and why. ” I think the sensationalism and graphic nature of news programs are not appropriate for anyone at any age. There is no redeeming value in them.

Lastly, I agree that guns are extremely dangerous and shouldn’t be so widely available. Having said that, no amount of legislation is effective in bringing morality or civility to the table. This starts with us intentionally living lives that are compelled by love. The vicious tone of in the public sector (politics is just one example) has been appalling.

The non-violent resistance modeled over the centuries is still held up with great reverence. We need to love our neighbor.

As a parent who lived through the Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine, Virginia Tech — and more — with a son in school, then college — it’s a nightmare all over again. What scares me is that so many of us who’ve lived through so many of these are growing numb to the carnage. As a friend of mine said recently, “Oh no, not another shooting this week …” Thanks for a great piece. I will do all I can to help parents with younger kids who are going through this, as I have been doing for the past several years.

Beautifully put Jennifer and I’m sure it will help someone. Thanks for having the presence of mind to do what you do so well. I thought I was feeling a little more stable, when suddenly I thought of all those Christmas presents that have been stored away for kids who will never open another present.

The stifled lives lost today are creating a hole in the hearts of everyone. When we have pain, we feel afraid and when we are afraid we become defensive and lash out, blaming someone or something (gun owners, guns, control laws, etc.) as we try to make our world right again so we can stop being afraid. But the truth is a gun is just a thing and it takes a person to make it work. The man who used one today in such a heinous way was sick and/or evil. The guns had no opinion or agenda.

Putting our energies into constructive ways of building our communities, caring for the victims and passing and enforcing harsher punishments for offenders is, in my opinion, the right way to move forward. That and a great deal of prayer.

From the distance, the free use of guns is something that I have never understood of the American society. When my son spent an academic year living with a family in Montana, I remember having seen a man practicing target shooting with a pistol just before the road. Another time, in Boston, a saw a man that was browsing attentively a guns catalogue in a bus. And nobody cared! I wondered whether he would have dared to browse a sexshop catalogue before the sights of other passengers without feeling ashamed. Unfortunately, we share one thing with America: the love for sensationalism that many people have, and that the media provide them in full.

Lousing someone you love is life altering. I did 2 years ago. People say time heals…I guess they don’t know what else to say. It does not. What does help is talking about him. So if I can give any advive to help the people in CT is be there for them. At 2:00 in the morning when they can’t sleep, to hug them when their arms ache to hold their loved one, to pick up food when they can’t bear to leave the house. I don’t mean for a week or a month, or a year. This kind of pain has no time table. So be there as often and long as you can.

I’d also like to state that most individuals that find themselves without the need of health insurance usually are students, self-employed and those that are not working. More than half on the uninsured are under the age of Thirty five. They do not think they are requiring health insurance since they’re young along with healthy. The income is typically spent on housing, food, along with entertainment. Lots of people that do go to work either complete or part-time are not presented insurance via their work so they proceed without with the rising tariff of health insurance in america. Thanks for the concepts you write about through this site.

Excellent advice on how to get ahead of the story the children will hear elsewhere, anyway. Age appropriate honesty, at this point, is, in my opinion, the best policy. But, I worry that too many parents in their own grief and fear and need to sensationalize, will scare the kids more than they are already. I would only add that little people have big eyes and ears. Adult conversations regarding this need to be just that.
I am heartsick.
As grandparent, I can say wholeheartedly, it brings up fears and questions and opinions for us, as well. While I see the critical need for immediate attention to the gun and mental health issue, I can’t help but feel that first and foremost, each of us, as guardians, need to be on the offensive. Ready and aware, ‘armed’, so to speak, for that which is sadly becoming all to prevalant. In fact, I am in favor of each school having it’s own armed guard.

I found #5 to be so true with my youngest. I thought she’d have quite a few questions, worries, concerns, but after I answered a few, she moved on. I find that I’m the one who really wants to talk about it–but I save my conversation, as you suggest, for adults.